You’ll recall Ben Stein’s ethical lapse last month that got him fired from his plum Sunday business column in The New York Times.
You know, the one where he shilled on TV for Free Score, one of those Web sites that gets people to sign up for a “free” credit score and hopes that they forget to cancel their membership before the free week is up. If they forget, they start getting hit with $30 monthly charges every month for a service they don’t need.
This is cut and dry an ethics case. There’s no gray here. Stein clearly violated the Times’s ethics rules specifically, common-sense journalistic rules generally, and even more broadly, just plain old do-unto-others ethics.
So it’s bizarre to see Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics, no less, at Washington and Lee and Miami Herald columnist, comes to Stein’s defense today in a poorly argued column arguing that he violated no ethical bounds.
Felix Salmon of Reuters, who broke the Ben Stein ad story, guts this nonsense like a trout (UPDATE: Bad fish pun was not intended.) There’s little left on the bone for me, so just go read Salmon. Here’s the money graph:
Firstly, and most importantly, it’s ethically wrong for anybody, NYT columnist or otherwise, to shill for FreeScore. It’s an evil company, devoted to tricking America’s poorest, most indebted, and most financially illiterate citizens into paying money they can’t afford for a service they don’t need and which is available for free elsewhere. The job of a business columnist is to write columns in the public interest. The job of a FreeScore pitchman is most emphatically against the public interest. There’s your conflict right there.
Wow. Not only must Ben Stein's association with FreeScore be an ethical lapse in the context of Stein's column in The New York Times, but FreeScore must be an 'evil company'. Would everything have been OK with Salmons and Chittum if Stein had been doing commercials for General Electric, owner of NBC? I'm starting to smell the usual dreary political motive, rather than a concern with ethics, in Felix Salmon's piece, which in context does seem pretty lathered up.
It is especially odd in view of the context that The Times' most prominent political columnist, Paul Krugman, was found to have consulted with Enron (fee: $50,000) as that particular scandal broke, and as Krugman was denouncing the Bush administration for its associations with that company. (Krugman also is discovered by researchers more diligent than those at CJR to have called for a 'housing bubble' in response to the 2001 recession, but again, press critics chastely avert their eyes and accept Krugman's own tortured explanations for his statements.) Krugman suffered no opprobrium from the Miss Manners brigade in the press for the Enron matter; all kinds of politically-acceptable writers pocket speaking fees and other honoraria from institutions related to the issues they write about; at some point, it will have to be explained to me why writers who have actually stolen the work of others (the late Molly Ivins, or Doris Kearns Goodwin come immediately to mind) remain in good standing with the media establishment, while someone like Stein is anathemized. I can't at all imagine why . . .
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 18 Aug 2009 at 11:48 AM